Designing habitats that work

 Melody presented at the AICAS conference


By presenting at the Iberian Association of Wild Animal Caretakers (AICAS) ninth Congress, Melody:

  • Encouraged empathy: by asking "do you know what the animals in your care do, while you're not there?". Some participants noted that they had not thought about this much before.
  • Made learning and interconnection accessible: by presenting in Spanish more animal caregivers were able to consider the individual's needs of their animals, alongside their own wellbeing needs. Making important links between quality of work and quality of life for both.
  • Supported creativity: because despite the shared challenges of limited time and money, people started to ask...

"How can we re-design a habitat for it to be functional and positive from the animal’s perspective?"

Find out by listening to the podcast

 

Last week, The Animal Behaviour Management Alliance invited Sabrina to talk about animal wellbeing science and practice.


Sabrina...

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Environmental enrichment as the sprinkles on top

What do we mean by environmental enrichment? As with anything, it is always good and helpful to understand where things came from. Environmental enrichment was born from something that the words reflect: enriching the environment.

Not long ago, and even today, animals in all kinds of systems can find themselves in environments that are not enriching, which are lacking in stimuli, in opportunities, complexity, and therefore a lack of choices and control and ability to exercise one's agency.
Some of these areas are still very much lacking, think for example of the back of house areas animals can spend many hours in. Whether in zoos, aquariums, research laboratories, with farm animals, or animals in shelters and at home, we came to the realisation that we need to enrich the environment by adding structures (flexible, fixed, soft, hard, etc.), vegetations, substrates, considering their social needs, hiding places, places as viewpoints, shade, or spaces large enough to rest, play or...

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